The project was launched in summer 2003, motivated by the fact that there was no good graphical SILC client available. There was obvious demand for an easy to use client, as at the time there was only one fully featured client and it was a textual client.

First proof-of-concept version of Silky was drafted together quickly in couple of days, and it got some people interested in developing a fully featured graphical client. Now, after year and a half and with contributions from many friendly people Silky is starting to look and feel like a real chat client.

The primary objective of the project is to create a chat client that suits the needs of beginners as well as advanced users. Silky differentiates from other simple SILC clients, such as GAIM, by having more features and flexibility, but without losing the easy of use.

Portability is one of the key features of the Silky. The code has been tested to work in all major operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Silky should run in all kinds of environments from embedded Linux devices to powerful desktop workstation.

Next steps of the project are to complete all missing features, and to get Silky shipped with all major Linux distributions.

Here are some key features of "Silky":
Silky is a secure chat client.
Silky has a simple and easy to use user interface.
Silky runs in Windows, Linux, OS X, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and possibly in some other systems.
Silky doesn't require the GNOME desktop to run, just GTK2 runtime libraries.
Silky uses the SILC Protocol, used in free-for-all chat network SILCNet.
Silky is an open source application, with GPL licence.

Requirements:
libsilc (the SILC Toolkit)

What's New in This Release:
Silky is a secure chat client for GTK+-2, using the SILC protocol.